disneytips.com: Universal’s operational teams face constant challenges managing parade logistics during a multi-month event where any mechanical failure, navigation error, or infrastructure issue can disrupt carefully scheduled entertainment that guests have waited hours to experience and that forms core memories of Universal Orlando vacations.
3 comments:
I really don’t know anything about parade floats, but my old boss had spent a lot of his early career building and engineering parade floats in Portland, which is a big parade city. He was always bringing in techniques from his parade float years to theater design, and although the two disciplines have very different objectives and constraints, I can see many similarities especially as we move more towards automation in the theater industry. Parade floats have to reliably travel on a set path, and have to take into account the massive, unpredictable audience and city architecture that surrounds the float. While the audience is more stationary in theater, we still have to think about audience safety and also consistency between shows on longer runs. This evacuation is a good reminder of how no matter how calculated things are, sometimes things just happen and you have to readjust. My old boss was great at fixing things on the fly, and maybe I can attribute that to his parade experience.
Hey this is so dope! I never knew that Universal threw down for Mardi Gras all the way in Florida! Now the article did not talk about it, but they better have some king cake and boudin to go along with the celebration! Parades are awesome, and always take place for some reason at theme parks like Universal Studios, but especially make sense for the Mardi Gras festivities! Mardi Gras is one of the many gems of the south, and the north really has nothing like it! I truly miss celebrating it back home! I am really intrigued by how they throw down for Mardi Gras in a PG way. I think that this type of entertainment is so cool, because there is so much that can be explored! Like you could put anything you think of on a float and roll it down the street! I remember seeing the Mainstreet Electrical Parade in magic kingdom when I was younger, and it was stunning! While I don’t yet know much about parades, I would love to work on them one day!
I don't have much experience in parades but from a theatrical perspective this setup seems to have many difficult to control layers of operational complexity that in traditional theatre we don't have to think about. For one there's the outdoor aspect: the floats and drivers need to be prepared to operate in bad weather. But from a design perspective the idea to have audience members ride the float is fun but as this article shows adds more complexity to already difficult situations where a float encounters difficulty. And of course the very nature of a parade makes things more difficult that traditional theatre from a technical standpoint, perhaps most obvious from this article is the fact that if a parade car gets stuck the show will inevitably be interrupted because the float is physically unable to move to its next location whereas in theatre in most cases an effect not working as intended would not be show stopping because actors can usually improv to get the scene back on track. Overall accidents like this are unfortunate but somewhat to be expected in the theme park industry. Companies like Disney and Universal are all about pushing their capabilities and technology to the limits to create the best experience for guests. Ultimately pushing a show to the limits of its capabilities will always introduce some possibility for error. Like always a well managed show isn't about never having errors, it's about how you recover. In this case it seems like Universal was able to get the show back on track in relatively little time and had plans in place for what to do if a float got stuck.
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